Internet

GOOGLE'S corporate motto - "Don't be evil" - gave many people confidence to trust it with their personal data, and helped it grow into the behemoth that it is today. But in recent weeks there's been a noticeable increase in anti-Google sentiment, some of it from well- known names on the internet.
Danny Sullivan, an expert on search engines since the early days of the web, wrote an article picking apart Google's policy of combining search results from the wider web with those from people you may be connected with on its new Facebook competitor, Google+.
Google's new policy is called Search Plus Your World, or SPYW. It's part of a wider shake-up at Google, which has seen less popular products and services ditched, and a renewed focus on simplicity and clarity.
Completing the shake-up was a new privacy policy, intended as a simpler replacement for the 60-odd policies the company had previously, one for each of its many offerings. Now there's just the one.
The upshot of SPYW is that one person's search for "football" won't show the same results as someone else's. Critics, including Sullivan, say this isn't how web search was supposed to work.
If the changes at Google bother you too, there are alternatives. DuckDuckGo (www.duckduckgo.com) is an oddly-named but very decent web search tool. Microsoft's Bing (www.bing.com) is also worth a try.
YOU LOOK GREAT IN THAT PASSWORD: Hate remembering passwords? Yes, so does everyone else. Microsoft's had a clever idea for Windows 8, though: picture passwords. You choose a picture (say of your family, or your pets, or anything), then you're asked to pick out a series of clicks and dragged gestures across it.
Instead of having to remember a long string of numbers and letters, all you'd need to remember might be: "Click on Aunt Jane's nose, then drag from her left knee to her dog's tail." Find out more at http://goo.gl/FcnX8 FACEBOOK'S BIG FUNDRAISER: Last week Facebook announced an initial public offering) of shares for sale to the public. The eight-year-old brainchild of youthful Mark Zuckerberg made $1bn in profit last year, and wants to raise another $5bn from the floatation. Zuckerberg declared that Facebook "was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected". That, and make a huge pile of cash.
LOSE WEIGHT ON THE WEB: Swole is a free diet generator tool on the web (www.swole.me). Enter the number of calories you'd like to eat each day, and how many meals you want to eat, and it will generate a complete menu for you. If you don't know your target daily calorie count, there's a built-in calculator. The site was built by Americans, so all the measurements are in cups rather than pounds and ounces, but the dietary advice is the same wherever you live: eat less, exercise more.
Website of the week Like bunnies? Like days? This one's for you - dailybunny.org